


capture what time forgot

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Dildos, F/F, Face-Sitting, Femslash February, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Pre-Series, Strap-Ons, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 13:19:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9609161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Sick of being alone and doing nothing, Miranda heads into Nassau one day and hears a delectable French accent that she simply can't resist.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vowelinthug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vowelinthug/gifts).



> Happy Femslash February, everyone! Gemma, I hope you enjoy this. :D
> 
> This work was influenced by Shiro's awesome fics, especially [What Is Best](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6686299) and [Opportunities](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8670817). <3 Title from Hayley Kiyoko's 'Ease My Mind'.

She stood in front of the stall of books, eyes darting over the array of titles. There were many she recognised, but more she did not. She spotted a French book that she had owned and loved, once, and she reached for it. Someone else did so at the same time, fingers brushing against hers. She turned, startled, to see a young woman with a head of dark curls like a nymph from a painting. Only in the paintings the nymphs were always white as the moon, and this woman was not. She was not naked, either, unlike so many painted nymphs, but it was a close thing: she was wearing a scrap of a dress, its décolletage low on her chest and its hem high on her thighs.

“Parlez-vous français?” the woman asked. Her silky voice transported Miranda to Paris for a brief moment, standing on Pont Royal looking upon the Seine in the salmon light of dusk, a pretty Parisienne whispering in her ear.

“Oui,” Miranda replied, and continued, still in French: “Though it has been some time since I last spoke it out loud. I hope you will forgive me if I sound rusty.”

“Your French is lovely, madame,” the woman said. Her eyes swept over Miranda very deliberately. “And so are you.”

Miranda felt herself blush. Honest to God—she _blushed_. It had been some time since anyone had flirted with her so blatantly. And another woman, no less! In fact, the last time she had bedded a woman was in Paris. She resisted the urge to smooth down the front of her dress, a nervous habit she had. In London or in Paris all her dresses in their glorious bursts of colour and luxuriously flowing fabric had drawn the eye and enticed her potential paramours as much as anything else about her appearance or her wit did, but here she wasn’t sure if her plain dresses didn’t just make her look worn and faded, a dried flower preserved between the yellowed pages of a book, instead of one in bloom.

She breathed in slowly. She could do this. “You are quite the vision yourself,” she said, letting a smile play on her lips. “My name is Miranda. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mademoiselle…?”

“Max.”

Miranda’s hand still rested lightly on the book, as did Max’s. Miranda allowed her hand to fall upon Max’s, moving it gently from the book. “Here, let me purchase this for you, and perhaps we may take this conversation elsewhere?” She had a fairly good idea of where they might be taking this conversation. Judging by Max’s clothing and demeanour, she was one of the girls who worked at the inn just down the street.

Max nodded, her eyes dancing with promise. “Thank you.”

Miranda haggled briefly with the bookseller before dropping the coins into his dirty palm. She picked up the book, and followed Max, who led her to the inn, just as she had expected. She had never been inside the inn. Her first impression of it was that it was quite green, though not nearly as green as the curtains in her and Thomas’ house in London. And _Lord_ , were there a lot of tits. Had she seen this many exposed breasts in her entire life prior to this moment?

She did not have time to take it all in; Max grasped her hand and guided her up the stairs, squeezing past more half-naked women on the way, and into a room.

Max leaned back on the door to shut it. Miranda looked at her, and was suddenly unsure. She hefted the book in her hands. “ _Les Femmes Illustres_ ,” she said. “A very rousing read, this one. Do you know much about Mademoiselle de Scudery?”

Max shook her head, taking the book from Miranda and setting it down on a chair.

“She styled herself Sappho,” Miranda said. “Because Sappho is the female writer par excellence. They all try valiantly to ignore the fact that Sappho loved women. But I am inclined to forgive Mademoiselle de Scudery at least for this, since she argued so passionately for the education of women and for their intellectual development, and I am nothing if not sympathetic to her cause.”

“I have not heard of Sappho,” Max said, tilting her head in curiosity.

Miranda blinked. “Ah, I do apologise,” she said. “Sappho was a female poet—Greek—who lived over two thousand years ago. She wrote about her love for women in her poetry, but people do their best to sweep that part under the rug, or they wilfully rewrite it into something it is decidedly not.”

“But you know better,” Max said, smiling sweetly and reaching out for Miranda’s hand once more, running her thumb over Miranda’s knuckles.

Miranda shivered. “It is impossible for me to read Sappho’s poetry and not see in those verses her desire for women, as clear as day. To deny its existence seems to me to be a sin.”

“Because you are sympathetic to Sappho’s cause too, I suppose?” Max said, drawing Miranda closer. She began to unpin Miranda’s hair from its bun without sight of it, something which James always struggled with.

“You could say that,” Miranda said. She felt her hair fall loose over her nape, and shivered again. This close, she was stunned by the hazel of Max’s eyes, the rich gold-brown-green of them: the colours of Nassau itself. Miranda felt just as breathless as when she had seen the town for the very first time from the deck of a ship. Even clouded by grief and anger, she had thought it a beautiful place.

“Obviously I ought to read Sappho’s poetry too,” Max said, the back of her hand trailing down Miranda’s cheek, her eyes looking straight into Miranda’s. Miranda’s nipples hardened. Even to be looked at like this was overwhelming. Nobody looked at her like this anymore. Occasionally men leered, but nobody looked at her with desire that was both intense and pure, with eyes that saw all of her. 

“Regrettably, there are no good translations of it into either English or French,” Miranda said, before Max kissed her.

The kiss was soft like a dream of happier times, and Miranda sank into it much more easily than she sank into sleep these days; her entire body lightened as she kissed Max, until she felt she was floating rather than standing.

She pulled away, gripping Max’s shoulders to anchor herself. “I assume there are rules? And… terms of payment?”

“You bought me a book,” Max said. “That is payment enough. Besides, I like to share my bed with women, but it is difficult to find a woman sympathetic to my cause. I want you here as much as you want to be here. As for rules, well, shall we not simply discover together what brings us both the most pleasure?” 

“That sounds very agreeable,” Miranda said, and they kissed again. Max’s hands were in Miranda’s hair, fingers teasing along Miranda’s scalp, and Miranda couldn’t stop shivering.

“Are you all right?” Max murmured against her lips.

“Yes,” Miranda said, hastily. “It’s just… been a very long time.” 

“Let Max take care of you.” Max’s smile glowed warmly like the sea around Nassau in sunlight. Her fingers traced along Miranda’s collarbone, then down, following the neckline of Miranda’s dress, and Miranda gasped. She could not articulate how she felt in that moment, being touched in that way and hearing someone say they would take care of her. It was as if she had been tarnished silver, and Max had polished her to shining again. She had forgotten that she could shine like this.

Max helped Miranda out of her dress and shift; Max’s own dress was a rather more simple affair and Max slipped out of it in an instant. Miranda lay down on the bed and Max knelt between her legs, bending over her, and kissed her: her jaw, her neck, her shoulders. There were so many times in the past few years that Miranda had wished to die. She had always kept going because James needed her, and she had promised Thomas, but now she thought that perhaps she was dead after all, and this was some strange but sublime Heaven. Max’s mouth and hands roamed everywhere, and the pleasure that built in Miranda was not desperate or urgent or violent. It was ethereal.

She wanted to weep from it. She had not known anybody who could make her feel like this, aside from Thomas, and that had been effected by comfort and familiarity founded in years of marriage. She had known Max for all of half an hour.

Max’s hands caressed her sides as Max’s tongue swirled around her nipple; Max’s thumbs were massaging over the bones at her hip, and it created such a delicious sensation all together that Miranda’s cunt throbbed. She moaned, and Max raised her head and smiled, and said, “So, since I cannot read Sappho’s poetry in English or in French, how shall I ever get to appreciate it?”

“I know some verses by heart,” Miranda said, and her breath hitched when Max’s fingers dragged along her wetness. Max held her lips apart with two fingers and tapped her clit, and Miranda groaned. “In her most famous poem she describes how she feels when she sees the woman of her affections talking to a man.”

“Hmm, is a finger all right?” Max asked.

“My dear, you could fuck me with four fingers and I’d love it,” Miranda said, and Max chuckled, her eyes golden with delight.

“You like having your pussy filled?”

“Oh, _do_ I ever,” Miranda said, and Max kissed her.

“I think I know how to indulge you,” Max said, “in a little while. But first, will you indulge me and recite to me the poem you speak of?” She teased the entrance to Miranda’s cunt with wicked flutters of her finger, and Miranda squirmed and rolled her hips in a silent plea. “Le poème?” Max prompted, playful as a puppy.

Miranda drank in the sight of Max above her, soft brown skin and sweet heavy breasts, and the poetry rose to her lips as naturally as water flowed from springs. “ _Oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings, for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me_.”

Max slid two fingers inside Miranda, skilfully pressing them down on the spot that made Miranda shudder and sigh with pleasure. Miranda reached up and ran a hand down Max’s arm.

“ _No: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin, and in eyes no sight, and drumming fills ears_.”

Max rubbed Miranda’s clit in steady motions and thrust her fingers into Miranda in an increasing rhythm, and Miranda cried out, grabbing a fistful of the sheets. She could not remember what came next. She closed her eyes and permitted herself this forgetting, until her orgasm overcame her. As the waves of pleasure slammed into her and then receded, she opened her eyes.

A sheen of sweat gleamed on Max’s chest. Miranda remembered the rest: “ _And cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me._ ” 

“That is wonderful poetry, but do not die just yet, ma cherie,” Max said, and Miranda was once again struck by the beauty of her glittering eyes. “I have more planned for you. For us.”

Max got up and went to a chest at the side of the room, bringing back an armful of items. With an excited grin, she showed Miranda three different dildos, and Miranda was instantly enamoured with the biggest one, the slight curve of it, the bulbous end, the ink-black leather, seductive as night. She reached out to touch it, her fingers dimpling the pliant leather ever so slightly. It felt as gorgeous as it looked.

“I knew you would choose that one,” Max said, casting aside the other two. She affixed the dildo to the harness and Miranda helped her with the harness straps. “You have used a dildo before?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. Sadness welled in her, as it often did without warning, nostalgia catching her at the most unexpected of moments.

Nostalgia. Whenever she thought of that word, she thought of how charmed she had been when Thomas pointed out to her the Greek words that formed it, charmed as she always was by the illumination of things that were once obscure. Their world had been a place where everything had sense and meaning if one only had the right tools to uncover them.

Nostos and algos, homecoming and pain. Her mind returned to a home she had lost, to the bedroom she had shared with her husband. Thomas on all fours before her, in the bed that was theirs, head twisted back to look at her with such fond rapture as she fucked him.

She had used dildos on her own, and with other people, but it was Thomas she thought of. It was always Thomas. He was the sun which had given her world light. If the Earth were plunged into darkness and no day ever dawned again, how could anyone think of anything other than the sun?

“Miranda.” Max tucked a strand of Miranda’s hair behind her ear. “Miranda, lie on your side.”

Miranda did so, and felt the warm press of Max’s breasts against her back as Max lay down next to her. She hooked her leg back over Max’s waist, and felt Max’s fingers working their way inside her again, more of them this time. Three, then, eventually, four. As Max moved her fingers inside Miranda, she lifted the curtain of Miranda’s hair and kissed her nape and her back between her shoulderblades. Miranda whimpered, her cunt squeezing weakly around Max’s fingers. Her sadness could not but evaporate in the face of her pleasure; it was hard to stay mired in an aging grief when someone was fucking her so well, and kissing her with so much care at the same time.

Max withdrew her fingers and then Miranda was being stretched open by the head of the dildo. She swore, holding tightly onto a pillow. “That’s perfect, Christ, _oh_.” Max’s hand was firm on her thigh as she pushed into Miranda slowly, and then the dildo was all the way in and Miranda was shivering again as she clenched around it to feel the fantastic girth of it, as Max kissed the hollow spot just behind her ear.

Max began to rock in and out of her in small movements. She felt so completely full.

“Is it big enough for you, ma chère?” Max whispered in her ear.

She would have nodded, but it was not possible while lying on her side, so she resorted to saying “Yes” in a cracked voice. “Oh God, it feels huge, it’s so wonderful, I love it.” Max’s teeth grazed Miranda’s earlobe, and Miranda moaned, “Please, fuck me, oh please, Max.”

Max hummed, likely a noise of satisfaction at hearing Miranda beg, and she thrust into Miranda harder, circling Miranda’s clit with her clever fingers. Miranda felt overwhelmed by pleasure, blinded like Plato’s allegorical prisoner stumbling out of the cave of ignorance into the daylit world of knowledge for the very first time. There was a world outside of darkness, outside of suffocating grief and boredom that strangled her even more than the grief. It was painful even to acknowledge that that world still existed; it was easier to think that her life had ended and that all good things had perished with it, and let that be that. But that world did exist, and it was brilliant beyond hope, and Miranda wanted to go into it again and leave the darkness behind.

Max’s arm wriggled between her and the mattress and then Max was cupping her breast, pinching her nipple, and still Max’s fingers kept up their rhythmic circles over Miranda’s clit and she fucked into Miranda unrelentingly. Miranda turned her head and crushed her lips against Max’s in a messy kiss, and whined into Max’s mouth as she came, the sensation of her orgasm like being bathed in sunlight.

Panting, she broke the kiss and rolled around so that her body faced Max’s, and she undid the straps of the harness, fingers fumbling in impatience. “What is the hurry, Miranda?” Max said, lazily stroking Miranda’s cheek and smiling.

“I want to taste you,” Miranda said, pressing the flat of her fingers along Max’s wetness and digging the heel of her palm against Max’s clit, and smirking when Max gasped. “Will you sit on my face, mademoiselle?” 

Max looked thrilled, her eyes wide. “Avec plaisir,” she said, throwing all the leather to one side. She kissed Miranda again—Max was so marvellously generous with her kisses—and then Miranda lay on her back as Max knelt over her face. Miranda inhaled and felt giddy with the scent of Max. She bit kisses into the skin of Max’s thighs first, and then when Max’s hips twitched, she licked along Max’s wetness in long, leisurely swipes of her tongue. Max’s taste was as beautiful as the rest of her.

Miranda kissed Max’s clit and sucked it very gently, and Max squealed, the muscles in her thighs jumping under Miranda’s hands. Then Miranda flicked her tongue rapidly over the same spot, and Max groaned, one hand tangling into Miranda’s hair. French words poured from her mouth as she told Miranda how incredible it felt, as she praised Miranda and admired how good she was at this. Miranda tugged at Max’s thighs, encouraging Max to put more of her weight on Miranda’s face, and Max finally obliged, grinding down onto Miranda’s mouth, her wetness gliding back and forth along Miranda’s tongue.

It exhilarated Miranda to be the source of someone’s pleasure like this. She had not even realised how much she missed it till now, but _God_ , she had missed it. James loved her, and they fucked, but she knew she was not what he wanted. What little pleasure he managed to find with her, he found with eyes closed, cocooned in some unknowable fantasy, probably spun out of memory and imagination both. But Max desired _her_ , and Max was taking her pleasure from her and her alone. Max was moaning her name and looking down at her. Max was not thinking of anybody else but her.

Miranda ached with contentment, and when Max’s moans rose in pitch and her thighs trembled, locking in place, Miranda felt a quivering rush of pleasure all the way down to her toes as if she herself was coming too.

Max collapsed next to Miranda. “Max has met her match,” she mumbled. “How are you so good at that?”

“Experience,” Miranda answered, and Max laughed.

“Yes, I have only tumbled with girls who have spent too much time mastering the art of pleasing men and do not truly know what to do with other women,” Max admitted. “You are a breath of fresh air, ma chère.”

“And how do you feel about pleasing men?” Miranda asked.

“I do not love men,” Max said. “But giving them pleasure in exchange for coin does not bother me.” She shrugged. “There are worse things.”

Miranda kissed Max’s shoulder. “What do you dream of doing?”

“Running away,” Max said. “But do we not all dream of that?”

Miranda had run to the furthest corner of the world. She wanted to be able to run _toward_ something again, but she did not say this. She merely kissed the bump of Max’s collarbone, enjoying the closeness of another human being as much as she could while she still had it.

“In the meantime, if you ever wish to visit again and buy me another book, my door would be open to you,” Max said, and Miranda heard her loneliness, and wished that she could remove it somehow. But she had never really believed that a lonely soul could cure another lonely soul: they could only ever offer each other temporary relief.

* * *

She thought about going back into Nassau again. She thought about it, but she did not go, knowing that it was a risk she should never have taken in the first place. She had been so deathly bored, and she made bad decisions when bored, but she would not let it happen again.

A few months later, James was having dinner with her when he said, “Remember when I told you Eleanor’s finally come to her senses and broken things off with Vane? Well, now she’s fallen in love with some girl at the inn. Absolutely besotted, won’t let anyone else near the girl.”

Miranda swallowed her spoonful of soup a little too fast and spluttered into a napkin. “What’s the girl’s name?”

James frowned. “Max, I think? Why?”

Miranda glanced away briefly to compose herself before looking back at James with a smile. “Oh, you know I like to keep abreast of the gossip,” she said, and unclenched her fist from the napkin with some effort.

She was happy for Max. She was. And now she no longer had any reason to be tempted to go into Nassau again.

She told herself it was a good thing. And Max had already given her a gift. There was joy, after all. There was— _life_.

She clung onto that notion. Even if she would not see Max again, Max had reminded her of the dazzling world beyond this grey house, and she would do her utmost to make sure she and James found their way back to that world.

**Author's Note:**

> Miranda quotes Sappho's fr. 31. I used Anne Carson's translation from _If Not, Winter_.
> 
> Comments are much appreciated! <3 You can find me [on tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) where I am slowly dying over S4.


End file.
